Rooflights and skylights in Guildford

Guildford sits 28.3 road miles from Crawley, well inside the thirty miles we cover. The town is the seat of Guildford Borough in west Surrey, about 27 miles southwest of London, and it is surrounded by the Surrey Hills National Landscape.

Geography matters to a rooflight in a practical way. A town in a river gap has slopes, and slopes mean roofs that face every direction and houses stepped up the hillside. A rooflight on a north slope collects even, steady daylight. One on a south slope gathers more sun, and the glazing specification has to allow for that, which is a separate conversation from noise. Our guide to where to position a skylight in a room sets out how we weigh the two.

We come to the house for a survey before anything is priced. We stand in the loft or beneath the flat roof, read the framing, and sit quietly in the room for long enough to hear what it hears. What we heard goes into the written quiet spec that arrives with every quote, along with the glazing build we would choose in answer to it.

The town centre conservation area appraisal describes the roofscape as very important. It records mainly handmade clay tiles, with brick chimneys rising among them. That single sentence says a lot about how a rooflight should behave in the centre of Guildford.

Handmade clay tiles are not flat and they are not uniform. Each one has a slight camber and a variation in size, so the surface of the roof has a soft, uneven texture that catches light. A roof window set into that surface needs a flashing kit that matches the profile of the tile, and the fitting has to be dressed carefully so the joins sit down into the texture instead of riding on top of it. A kit chosen for a machine-made concrete tile will not sit right, and from the street that shows.

The same appraisal points us to the chimneys. A brick stack is a fixed point in a roof, and the framing around it limits where an opening can go. We read the position of the stack before we mark the slope, and we keep the opening clear of it by a margin that leaves room for the trimmers and for proper flashing.

The town centre appraisal records late nineteenth-century residential suburbs to the east and north of the centre, and early twentieth-century suburbs to the south. Those are two distinct eras, and each leaves its own questions under the roof.

The earlier suburbs are Victorian in date. Roofs of that period commonly carry a steeper pitch, and a steep pitch is helpful to a roof window. Rain runs off it quickly and there is plenty of slope in which to place glass. The difficulty is the timber itself, which has had more than a century to be altered by previous owners, and which we read carefully before cutting.

The southern suburbs date from the early twentieth century. Converting a loft in a house of that age into a room brings in the regulations on stairs, fire escape and insulation as well as the rooflight itself. Our page on building regulations for rooflights covers what applies to the glass, while a loft conversion brings wider requirements that the survey will flag.